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Lyanne Smith’s passion for collecting transit-related memorabilia began when she worked at the bus hub on 132nd Street in Newton. “I started as a transit operator in 1975,” explained Smith. “Basically, I worked for 38 years in transit and my husband (Norm) worked 40, so it was that personal side to our collection in […]

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A retail store near Granville Island known for selling handmade indigenous art has now opened a second location at Vancouver International Airport. Lattimer Gallery’s new space is in one of the most prominent and highly coveted locations at the airport, right next to The Spirit of Haida Gwaii: The Jade Canoe, Bill Reid’s monumental bronze sculpture in the international terminal.

A diverse collection of friends, former colleagues, archivists, museum curators, historians and others will gather Saturday to tell stories about Leonard Guy McCann, who died near the end of March at age 88. The wake should be a memorable one given the depth of sentiment expressed in the many emails I got about the man who over 45 years as curator and curator emeritus ushered the Vancouver Maritime Museum to its ranking among the top 10 such institutions in the world.

Gordon Smith, one of the country’s most respected artists, has donated a significant amount of his personal art collection to West Vancouver Museum. In an interview in his home by Lighthouse Park in West Vancouver Monday, Smith said he gave the works to the museum because he wanted to support visual arts in the community where he lives.

Tucked away in a nondescript union building at Victoria and Triumph streets is one of Vancouver’s great historic murals: Fraser Wilson’s 85-foot-long depiction of B.C.’s resource industries, circa 1947. The mural is done in a colourful social-realist style, like the famous Workers Public Administration murals in San Francisco’s Coit Tower. The left side of the mural shows a variety of workers plying their trade around the province; the right shows Vancouver’s working waterfront in the 1940s.

The summer skies over Vancouver will explode again in brilliant flashes of colour, with three new competitors joining the Honda Celebration of Light, the largest and longest-running offshore fireworks festival in the world. The 24th annual event will feature competitors from the United States, France and Japan starting July 26 and continuing July 30 and Aug. 2. The winner will be announced Aug. 4.

Mary Lipsett started collecting native artifacts in 1900, focusing on the northwest coast. A couple of decades later, she got into Oriental art. She had a good eye. When she was profiled in The Vancouver Sun’s Magazine Supplement on March 20, 1948, the headline read “Lipsett Oriental Art Collection is Canada’s Best.”

Usually when Heritage Vancouver releases its Top 10 list of endangered heritage sites, it picks 10 buildings. But there are so many heritage structures being lost in Vancouver’s ongoing construction boom, this year’s list includes whole neighbourhoods, as well as streets. “There’s city-wide policies at play that tend to override what used to be the traditional territory of heritage conservation,” explains Don Luxton of Heritage Vancouver.

Ceding two-thirds of the last, undeveloped block in downtown Vancouver for construction of a $300-million public art gallery will be a bold and optimistic decision, if council agrees next week. It’s also something long overdue.

In 2007, it looked like Vancouver might get a new art gallery, a new museum, a new maritime museum, a new national aboriginal art gallery, a new national portrait gallery and a new, privately funded waterfront sports stadium. Then the recession hit in 2008, and none of them got built.

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